Brazilian labourers on a sugar cane farm. Nearly 50% of arable land belongs to 1% of the population. Photograph: Andre Vieira/Getty Images

Brazilian police are investigating whether the fatal shooting of three rural activists was linked to their effort to win rights to land also contested by owners of a sugar mill.

The activists were shot on Saturday as they got out of a car near a landless workers' camp in the south-western Minas Gerais state.

A five-year-old girl, the granddaughter of two of those who were killed, survived the attack. No one has been arrested, a police spokesman said.

Watchdog groups said police were questioning land activists about the possibility the killings could have resulted from an internal conflict within their movement. The groups rejected that idea and accused landowners of paying gunmen to shoot the activists.

Carlos Calazans, head of the Minas Gerais branch of the federal department of land reform, known as Incra, said police were looking into the land dispute as a possible motive.

"It's definitely one of the theories for the motive behind this barbarous crime," he said. "I've no doubt these activists were summarily executed. But police have to follow all leads until they find the truth."

Calazans said the killed couple approached Incra last year seeking support in various land conflicts in the region, including the one with the mill owners. He said Incra tried to get the owners and activists to agree on the issue a few weeks ago, but the effort was unsuccessful.

Killings over land in Brazil are common, and people rarely face trial for the crimes.

The watchdog group Catholic Land Pastoral says more than 1,150 rural activists have been murdered in Brazil over the past 20 years. The killings are mostly carried out by gunmen hired by loggers, ranchers and farmers to silence protests over illegal logging and land rights, it says. Most of the killings happen in the Amazon region.

Fewer than 100 cases have gone to court since 1988, Catholic Land Pastoral says. About 80 of the hired gunmen have been convicted, while 15 of the men who hired them were found guilty, and only one is currently in prison.

The girl was apparently the only witness to the killings, which were carried out along a highway near the camp, about 25 miles (40km) south-east of Uberlandia. She told police a car cut off the one she was riding in with the victims, forcing it to stop. Either one or two gunmen then opened fire.

A statement on the Catholic Land Pastoral's website described the three victims as state leaders of the Landless Liberation Movement, one of several rural activist groups that invade land and set up camp, living on what they say is unproductive ground.

Brazil's agrarian reform laws allow the government to seize fallow farmland and distribute it to landless farmers. Nearly 50% of arable land belongs to 1% of the population, according to the government's statistics agency.

The latest killings come just before the month that landless worker movements typically step up invasions of what they say is unused land. The seizures are meant to mark the April 1996 killing of 19 landless activists in Para state.

Post by Big Bunny on Apr 5, 2012 22:14:49 GMT -5

Are human hatcheries and genetic tampering about to become a reality? Picture: Thinkstock

A radical proposal to modify physique and behaviour in response to climate change has been greeted with outrage, writes Catherine Armitage.

IF IT is so hard to change the climate to suit humans, why not alter humans to suit the changing climate, philosophers from Oxford and New York universities are asking.

They suggest humans could be modified to be smaller, dislike eating meat, have fewer children and be more willing to co-operate with social goals.

Behavioural changes might not be enough to prevent climate change even if they were widely adopted, and international agreements for measures such as emissions trading are proving elusive, say Matthew Liao of New York University and Anders Sandberg and Rebecca Roache of Oxford University.

So human engineering deserves serious consideration in the debate about how to solve climate change, they write in a coming paper for the academic journal Ethics, Policy & Environment.

A person's ecological footprint is directly correlated to size, because larger people eat more than lighter people, their cars need more fuel to carry them and they wear out shoes, carpets and furniture sooner than lighter people, the authors write. They suggest hormone treatments could be used to suppress child growth, or embryos could be selected for smaller size.

Reducing consumption of red meat could have significant environmental benefits, the paper says, citing estimates that as much as 51 per cent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock farming. They say people who lack the motivation or willpower to give up eating meat could be helped by ''meat patches'' on their skin to deliver hormones to stimulate their immune system against common bovine proteins.

Better educated women have fewer children, so human engineering to improve cognition could reduce fertility as ''a positive side effect from the point of view of tackling climate change'', the paper argues.

Pharmacological treatments such as the ''love drug'' oxytocin could encourage people to act as a group and boost their appreciation of other life forms and nature, the authors say.

The paper has sparked a storm in the blogosphere. The environmentalist Bill McKibben tweeted that the authors had proposed ''the worst climate-change solutions of all time''. They have also been denounced as Nazis and ecofascists.

Illustration: Cathy Wilcox

The authors are bemused but unrepentant. If people were willing to consider ''really dangerous'' geoengineering solutions such as using space mirrors to alter the Earth's solar reflectivity, human engineering should also be on the table, Dr Liao said.

''At least the human engineering solutions we have described rely on tried and tested technology, whose risks, at least at the individual level, are comparatively low and well known.''

The authors emphasise they are not advocating human engineering be adopted, only that it be considered. They also envisage it as a voluntary activity possibly supported by incentives such as tax breaks or sponsored healthcare, not something coerced or mandatory.

Dr Sandberg, of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, said the paper had inadvertently ''managed to press two hot buttons'' - climate change and ''messing with human nature''. He predicted the paper would mutate into a story that scientists were working on re-engineering people to be green and it would be adopted as ''yet another piece of evidence of the Big Conspiracy''.

Post by Big Bunny on Apr 5, 2012 22:25:16 GMT -5

A clutch of recent studies reinforces evidence that people are causing climate change and suggests debate should now move on to a more precise understanding of its impact on humans.

The reports, published in various journals in recent weeks, add new detail to the theory of climate change and by implication cast contrarians in a more desperate light.

To be clear: there's nothing wrong with doubting climate change; but doubts based on ignorance, a political bias or fossil fuel lobbying don't help.

The basics, well known, are that rising greenhouse gas emissions are almost certainly responsible for raising global average surface temperatures (by about 0.17 degrees Celsius a decade from 1980-2010), in turn leading to sea level rise (of about 2.3 millimetres a year from 2005-2010) and probably causing more frequent bouts of extreme heatwaves and possibly more erratic rainfall.

Vast uncertainties remain about the risk of runaway warming, and the urgency: for example, about what level of greenhouse gas emissions will cause how much sea level rise this century.

The latest studies suggest firmer evidence for a human finger print, for example showing that pollution is largely responsible for a slow cycle in sea surface temperatures in the last century.

Recent studies also cast more light on trends, for example showing that the world has seen hotter years since 1998 (previously held by some as a record); and presenting firmer forecasts for 2050.

And others show lessons from the end of the last Ice Age: for example that rises in carbon dioxide preceded (and, by implication, caused) warming; and that sea levels at one point were rising by several metres a century.

None of these are individually particular clinchers - the problem was already clear - but collectively they pin down uncertainty seized on by sceptics.

Doubt

Climate science was under a cloud after a "climategate" scandal of scientists' emails leaked in 2009 was used by sceptics to suggest that they had deliberately manipulated data - allegations rejected by several public inquiries.

And a major UN panel report made a couple of factual errors, most notably saying that all Himalayan glaciers may melt by 2035, which seemed a typographical error meant to read 2350.

In retrospect, it's incredible that these cast doubt on the scientific theory.

Like any theory, climate change is based on probabilities and observations couched in error margins and difficult to prove conclusively.

It's complicated by the poor understanding of runaway effects which could make the planet all but unrecognisable - in warming, desertification and sea level rise - over the next few centuries, distracting from a cool view.

Observations alone of rising temperatures, seas and extreme heatwaves in the past century are enough to demonstrate the problem, coupled with the lack of a plausible, alternative explanation to rising man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

Studies

On Wednesday, scientists showed in an article published in the journal Nature that rising CO2 preceded warming at the end of the last ice age.

Previously, only Antarctic temperature data had been used, which appeared to show rising CO2 following temperature rather than the other way round.

Those older results had suggested a complex effect involving warming oceans, rising CO2 and melting ice which together tipped the world out of an Ice Age 20,000 years ago. Now the role of CO2 in driving the global climate change seems clearer.

Separately, scientists publishing in Nature estimated sea levels were rising by about 4 metres a century at one point around 15,000 years ago.

Examining the Earth's more recent history, scientists from Britain's Met Office Hadley Centre showed this week how a new understanding of the impact of pollution on cloud formation explained a slow temperature cycle previously blamed on ocean currents.

They said models could now explain an Atlantic sea surface cooling in the 1970s, and subsequent warming as clean air laws took effect. Various phases of the cycle are linked with droughts in parts of Africa and the Amazon, as well as hurricane activity.

Two weeks ago, publishing in the journal Nature Geoscience, scientists from several institutes estimated warming in the range of 1.4-3 degrees Celsius by 2050 (compared with 1961-1990 levels), a higher upper range than previously found using comprehensive, complex climate models.

Also two weeks ago, scientists from Britain's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) published updated temperature data including observations from more than 450 additional weather stations from the Arctic - made newly available by Russia and Canada.

They showed that 2005 and 2010 were the hottest years in a temperature record dating back to around 1850.

Previously CRU had said 1998 was the hottest year, leading some sceptics to claim "no global warming this century", to dismiss the urgency of the problem .

On the contrary, the basics of climate change are now understood and serious doubt is left only in the minds of those who cultivate it.

Climate science can now pin down the big uncertainties, about regional impacts, sea level rise and runaway effects, and help to put to work a response.

Post by Big Bunny on Apr 12, 2012 22:00:40 GMT -5

Climate change is the unseen player in the Arab SpringTHE NEWS TRIBUNEPublished: 04/11/12 12:05 am

Isn’t it interesting that the Arab awakening began in Tunisia with a fruit vendor who was harassed by police for not having a permit to sell food – just at the moment when world food prices hit record highs? And that it began in Syria with farmers in the southern village of Daraa, who were demanding the right to buy and sell land near the border, without having to get permission from corrupt security officials? And that it was spurred on in Yemen – the first country in the world expected to run out of water – by a list of grievances against an incompetent government, among the biggest of which was that top officials were digging water wells in their own backyards at a time when the government was supposed to be preventing such water wildcatting? As Abdelsalam Razzaz, the minister of water in Yemen’s new government, told Reuters last week: “The officials themselves have traditionally been the most aggressive well diggers. Nearly every minister had a well dug in his house.”

All these tensions over land, water and food are telling us something: The Arab awakening was driven not only by political and economic stresses, but, less visibly, by environmental, population and climate stresses as well. If we focus only on the former and not the latter, we will never be able to help stabilize these societies.

Take Syria. “Syria’s current social unrest is, in the most direct sense, a reaction to a brutal and out-of-touch regime,” write Francesco Femia and Caitlin Werrell, in a report for their Center for Climate and Security in Washington. “However, that’s not the whole story. The past few years have seen a number of significant social, economic, environmental and climatic changes in Syria that have eroded the social contract between citizen and government. ... If the international community and future policy makers in Syria are to address and resolve the drivers of unrest in the country, these changes will have to be better explored.”

From 2006-11, they note, up to 60 percent of Syria’s land experienced one of the worst droughts and most severe set of crop failures in its history. “According to a special case study from last year’s Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction, of the most vulnerable Syrians dependent on agriculture, particularly in the northeast governorate of Hassakeh (but also in the south), ‘nearly 75 percent ... suffered total crop failure.’ Herders in the northeast lost around 85 percent of their livestock, affecting 1.3 million people.” The United Nations reported that more than 800,000 Syrians had their livelihoods wiped out by these droughts, and many were forced to move to the cities to find work – adding to the burdens of already incompetent government.

“If climate projections stay on their current path, the drought situation in North Africa and the Middle East is going to get progressively worse, and you will end up witnessing cycle after cycle of instability that may be the impetus for future authoritarian responses,” argues Femia. “There are a few ways that the U.S. can be on the right side of history in the Arab world. One is to enthusiastically and robustly support democratic movements.” The other is to invest in climate-adaptive infrastructure and improvements in water management – to make these countries more resilient in an age of disruptive climate change.

An analysis by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, published last October in the Journal of Climate, and cited on Joe Romm’s blog, climateprogress.org, found that droughts in wintertime in the Middle East – when the region traditionally gets most of its rainfall to replenish aquifers – are increasing, and human-caused climate change is partly responsible.

“The magnitude and frequency of the drying that has occurred is too great to be explained by natural variability alone,” noted Martin Hoerling, of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, the lead author of the paper. “This is not encouraging news for a region that already experiences water stress, because it implies natural variability alone is unlikely to return the region’s climate to normal.”

Especially when you consider the other stresses. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, the executive director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development in London, writing in The Beirut Daily Star in February, pointed out that 12 of the world’s 15 most water-scarce countries – Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Israel and Palestine – are in the Middle East, and after three decades of explosive population growth these countries are “set to dramatically worsen their predicament. Although birth rates are falling, one-third of the overall population is below 15 years old, and large numbers of young women are reaching reproductive age, or soon will be.” A British Defense Ministry study, he added, “has projected that by 2030 the population of the Middle East will increase by 132 percent – generating an unprecedented ‘youth bulge.’”

And a lot more mouths to feed with less water than ever. As Lester Brown, the president of the Earth Policy Institute and author of “World on the Edge,” notes, 20 years ago, using oil-drilling technology, the Saudis tapped into an aquifer far below the desert to produce irrigated wheat, making themselves self-sufficient. But now almost all that water is gone, and Saudi wheat production is, too. So the Saudis are investing in farm land in Ethiopia and Sudan, but that means they will draw more Nile water for irrigation away from Egypt, whose agriculture-rich Nile Delta is already vulnerable to any sea level rise and saltwater intrusion.

If you ask “what are the real threats to our security today,” said Brown, “at the top of the list would be climate change, population growth, water shortages, rising food prices and the number of failing states in the world. As that list grows, how many failed states before we have a failing global civilization, and everything begins to unravel?”

Hopefully, we won’t go there. But, then, we should all remember that quote attributed to Leon Trotsky: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” Well, you may not be interested in climate change, but climate change is interested in you.

Folks, this is not a hoax. We and the Arabs need to figure out – and fast – more ways to partner to mitigate the environmental threats where we can and to build greater resiliency against those where we can’t. Twenty years from now, this could be all that we’re talking about.

The report, Who is Winning the Clean Energy Race, showed that G20 nations accounted for 95% of the investment in the sector (which does not include nuclear power).

The data, compiled by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, ranked the UK as seventh in the world, with $9.4bn of investment in 2011.

Over the course of the year, an additional 83.5 gigawatts (GW) was added to the world's clean energy generation capacity, including almost 30GW of solar and 43GW of wind.

"The sector continues to expand and is outpacing growth in the overall (global) economy. The sector reached its trillionth dollar of investment last year," observed Phyllis Cuttino, director of Pew's Clean Energy Program.

"We now have 565GW of installed (generation) capacity around the world. That outstrips nuclear installed capacity by 47%.

"So I think the facts fly in the face of those individuals who say this is a niche industry. This a growing and maturing sector."

Almost exactly two years ago, John Cook wrote about the 5 characteristics of science denialism. The second point on the list involved fake experts.

"These are individuals purporting to be experts but whose views are inconsistent with established knowledge. Fake experts have been used extensively by the tobacco industry who developed a strategy to recruit scientists who would counteract the growing evidence on the harmful effects of second-hand smoke."

We have seen many examples of climate denialists producing long lists of fake experts, for example the Oregon Petition and the Wall Street Journal 16. Now we have yet another of these lists of fake experts. 49 former National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) employees (led by Harrison Schmitt, who was also one of the Wall Street Journal 16) have registered their objection to mainstream climate science through the most popular medium of expressing climate contrarianism - a letter. As is usually the case in these climate contrarian letters, this one has no scientific content, and is written by individuals with not an ounce of climate science expertise, but who nevertheless have the audacity to tell climate scientists what they should think about climate science.

It's worth noting that when the signatories Meet The Denominator, as is also always the case, their numbers are revealed as quite unimpressive. For example, over 18,000 people currently work for NASA. Without even considering the pool of retired NASA employees (all signatories of this list are former NASA employees), just as with the Oregon Petition, the list accounts for a fraction of a percent of the available pool of people.

This letter, as these letters always do, has gone viral in the climate denial blogosphere, and even in the climate denial mainstream media (Fox News). But why exactly is this letter being treated as major news? That is something of a mystery. Or it would be, if the behavior of the climate denial community weren't so predictable.The Signatories

Obviously this letter first gained attention because the signatories are former NASA employees. They are being touted as "top astronauts, scientists, and engineers" and "NASA experts, with more than 1000 years of combined professional experience." Okay, but in what fields does their expertise lie?

Based on the job titles listed in the letter signatures, by my count they include 23 administrators, 8 astronauts, 7 engineers, 5 technicians, and 4 scientists/mathematicians of one sort or another (none of those sorts having the slightest relation to climate science). Amongst the signatories and their 1,000 years of combined professional experience, that appears to include a grand total of zero hours of climate research experience, and zero peer-reviewed climate science papers. You can review the signatories for yourself here.

Contrarians for Censoring Climate Science

These 49 former NASA employees wrote this letter to the current NASA administrator requesting that he effectively muzzle the climate scientists at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).

"We, the undersigned, respectfully request that NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites."

Since nothing in science is ever proven, apparently these individuals simply don't want NASA GISS to discuss science in their public releases or websites anymore. What specifically do they object to?

"We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled."

Ah yes, the ever-more-popular goalpost shift of "catastrophic climate change". The letter of course provides no examples of NASA GISS public releases or websites claiming that CO2 is having a catastrophic impact on climate change, and of course provides zero examples of these mysterious "hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists" who disbelieve these unspecified catastrophic claims. As is always the case with these types of letters, it is all rhetoric and no substance.

"As former NASA employees, we feel that NASA's advocacy of an extreme position, prior to a thorough study of the possible overwhelming impact of natural climate drivers is inappropriate.

As Skeptical Science readers are undoubtely well aware, the impact of natural climate drivers has been very thoroughly studied, and they simply cannot account for the observed global warming or climate change, especially over the past 50-65 years (Figure 1).

"We request that NASA refrain from including unproven and unsupported remarks in its future releases and websites on this subject. At risk is damage to the exemplary reputation of NASA, NASA's current or former scientists and employees, and even the reputation of science itself."

If NASA administrators were to censor the organization's climate scientists at the behest of a few of its former employees who have less climate science experience and expertise combined than the summer interns at NASA GISS, that would really damage NASA's exemplary reputation.Expertise Matters

Let's be explicit about our choice here.

On the one hand we have a bunch of former administrators, astronauts, and engineers who between them have zero climate expertise and zero climate science publications.

On the other hand we have the climate scientists at NASA GISS who between them have decades, perhaps even centuries of combined professional climate research experience, and hundreds, perhaps even thousands of peer-reviewed climate science publications.

Amongst those individuals at NASA GISS are some of the world's foremost climate scientists. They include James Hansen, who created one of the earliest global climate models in the 1980s, which has turned out to be remarkably accurate (Figure 2).

This is not a difficult choice for NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, Jr. We would not be surprised if he gave the 'skeptic' letter one look and tossed it in the recycle bin.

Climate contrarians clearly disagree, but in the real world, expertise matters. The fact that these 49 individuals used to work at NASA does not make them experts in everything NASA does. If the issue at hand were another moon landing, then by all means, the opinions of many of these individuals would be well worth considering. But we're not talking about space shuttle launches or moon landings here, we're talking about climate science. This is a subject which, to be blunt, these 49 individuals clearly don't know the first thing about.

To those who are making so much noise about this letter - the next time you are at a medical center in need of major surgery, will you go see a pediatrician? Or as a more relevant analogy, will you visit your neighbor, the retired dentist, and ask him to perform the surgery for you?

Somehow we suspect you will insist that the surgery be performed by a surgeon with relevant expertise. The reason is of course that expertise matters. Perhaps you would be wise to consider that fact the next time a group of climate contrarians with little to no expertise publish another of these letters.

As we suggested to William Happer, if climate contrarians want their opinions to be taken seriously, they should engage in real science within the peer-review system that works for every scientific field. That is how science advances - not through letters filled with empty rhetoric, regardless of how many inexpert retirees sign them.

Note that NASA Chief Scientist Waleed Abdalati has issued a response with very similar points and suggestions as our post:

"NASA sponsors research into many areas of cutting-edge scientific inquiry, including the relationship between carbon dioxide and climate. As an agency, NASA does not draw conclusions and issue 'claims' about research findings. We support open scientific inquiry and discussion.

"Our Earth science programs provide many unique space-based observations and research capabilities to the scientific community to inform investigations into climate change, and many NASA scientists are actively involved in these investigations, bringing their expertise to bear on the interpretation of this information. We encourage our scientists to subject these results and interpretations to scrutiny by the scientific community through the peer-review process. After these studies have met the appropriate standards of scientific peer-review, we strongly encourage scientists to communicate these results to the public.

"If the authors of this letter disagree with specific scientific conclusions made public by NASA scientists, we encourage them to join the debate in the scientific literature or public forums rather than restrict any discourse."

A European Union law that charges airlines for carbon emissions is "a deal-breaker" for global climate change talks, India's environment minister, Jayanthi Natarajan, said, hardening her stance on a scheme that has drawn fierce opposition from non-EU governments.

From 1 January 2012, all airlines using EU airports have come under the European Union emissions trading scheme (ETS), prompting a volley of retaliatory threats, including of a possible trade war.

US airlines have said they would comply, but China has barred its carriers from participating unless they are given permission to do so.

India on Wednesday formally forbad its airlines from participating, having earlier said it would boycott the scheme.

"For the environment ministry, for me, it is a deal-breaker because you simply cannot bring this into climate change discourse and disguise unilateral trade measures under climate change," Natarajan said on Wednesday.

"I strongly believe that as far as climate change discussions are concerned, this is unacceptable."

Natarajan leads India's negotiations at global climate change talks. It was not immediately clear if her comments reflected government policy in India.

A European commission spokesman said the European Union was willing to cut emissions faster and more deeply than emerging nations, such as India – the third biggest carbon emitter after China and the United States.

"The EU has been asked to reduce emissions more and faster than developing countries. We are happy to do that," he said.

"I don't see why this should be a deal-breaker if both share the same objective, which is reducing global emissions."

Any airline that does not comply with the EU law faces fines of €100 for each tonne of carbon dioxide emitted for which they have not surrendered allowances. In the case of persistent offenders, the EU could ban them from its airports.

The cost of compliance is much less significant at only around €2 per passenger for a flight from Beijing to Frankfurt, for instance, and that can be fed into fares.

Critics, however, have said their concern is the extra-territorial scope of the EU's law and that it unfairly charges non-European carriers by making them pay for the entire route, not just the European stretch of the journey.

The European commission has said it was driven to making all airlines pay for their emissions after more than a decade of talks at the United Nations' ICAO failed to find a global solution to rising emissions of greenhouse gases from aviation.

Since tensions have flared, efforts at the ICAO have gained momentum, although many environmental groups still question whether it can deliver a viable plan.

Outside the official ICAO framework, a so-called "coalition of the unwilling" bringing together more than 20 governments opposed to the EU scheme has held a series of meetings. The next is planned for Saudi Arabia around the middle of the year.

Before that, India wants talks with China and Russia to decide on a plan of action, a government official said.

"The onus is on them (EU) to stop a trade war. Once we meet China and Russia, it will be clear that there will be a wall between them and the rest of the world," a government source told Reuters.

The EU climate commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, has repeatedly said the only reason for the European Union to modify its law would be if the UN's ICAO could come up with a global plan to curb airline emissions. Writing in the Guardian this month, she said: "If we were to ask people who fly whether the polluter-pays principle should also apply to aviation I believe most of them would be unequivocally in favour ... We cannot accept threats of all kinds of trouble just because a small price has to be paid for the pollution caused by travel while no one grumbles about paying for online tickets, extra luggage or seat reservations."

Post by Big Bunny on Apr 17, 2012 9:07:59 GMT -5

It is becoming harder to ignore climate change in two very different countries entering election season

Amy Goodman guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 April 2012 18.00 BST

The Pentagon knows it. The world's largest insurers know it. Now, governments may be overthrown because of it. It is climate change, and it is real. According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, last month was the hottest March on record for the United States since 1895, when records were first kept, with average temperatures of 8.6F above average. More than 15,000 March high-temperature records were broken nationally. Drought, wildfires, tornadoes and other extreme weather events are already plaguing the country.

Across the world in the Maldives, rising sea levels continue to threaten this Indian Ocean archipelago. It is the world's lowest-lying nation, on average only 1.3 metres above sea level. The plight of the Maldives gained global prominence when its young president, the first ever democratically elected there, Mohamed Nasheed, became one of the world's leading voices against climate change, especially in the lead-up to the 2009 UN climate-change summit in Copenhagen. Nasheed held a ministerial meeting underwater, with his cabinet in scuba gear, to illustrate the potential disaster.

In February, Nasheed was ousted from his presidency at gunpoint. The Obama administration, through state department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, said of the coup d'etat: "This was handled constitutionally." When I spoke to Nasheed last month, he told me: "It was really shocking and deeply disturbing that the United States government so instantly recognised the former dictatorship coming back again. The European governments have not recognised the new regime in the Maldives." There is a parallel between national positions on climate change and support or opposition to the Maldives coup.

Nasheed is the subject of a new documentary, The Island President, in which his remarkable trajectory is traced. He was a student activist under the dictatorship of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom and was arrested and tortured, along with many others. By 2008, when elections were finally held, Gayoom lost, and Nasheed was elected. As he told me, though: "It's easy to beat a dictator, but it's not so easy to get rid of a dictatorship. The networks, the intricacies, the institutions and everything that the dictatorship has established remains, even after the elections." On the morning of 7 February 2012, under threat of death to him and his supporters from rebelling army generals, Nasheed resigned.

While no direct link has been found yet between Nasheed's climate activism and the coup, it was clear in Copenhagen in 2009 that he was a thorn in the Obama administration's side. Nasheed and other representatives from Aosis, the Alliance of Small Island States, were taking a stand to defend their nations' very existence, and building alliances with grass-roots groups like 350.org, that challenge corporate-dominated climate policy.

Back in the US, March delivered this year's first weather disaster to cause more than $1bn in damage, with tornadoes ravaging four central states and killing 41. Jeff Masters of weather website Weather Underground blogged about March "records not merely smashed, but obliterated". On 23 March, conservative Texas governor Rick Perry renewed the state of emergency declared there last year as a result of massive droughts.

Texas lists 1,000 of the state's 4,710 community water systems under restrictions. Spicewood, Texas, population 1,100, has run dry, and is now getting water trucked in. Residents have severe restrictions on water use. But for Perry, restricting corporations whose greenhouse gas emissions lead to climate change is heresy. Mitt Romney is on track to be the Republican candidate for president, with the support of former challengers like Perry. They are already attacking President Obama on climate change. The American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) has been promoting legislation in statehouses to oppose any climate legislation, and rallying members of Congress to block federal action, especially by hampering the work of the Environmental Protection Agency.

As the Centre for Media and Democracy has detailed in its "Alec Exposed" reporting, Alec is funded by the country's major polluters, including ExxonMobil, BP America, Chevron, Peabody Energy and Koch Industries. The Koch brothers have also funded Tea Party groups like FreedomWorks, to create the appearance of grassroots activism.

This election season will likely be marked by more extreme weather events, more massive loss of life and billions of dollars in damages. Nasheed is working to run again for his lost presidency, as Obama tries to hold on to his. The climate may hang in the balance.

Shooting oneself in the foot is dumb enough, but blowing both your legs off with a self-inflicted explosion of stupidity reveals a new level of idiocy. Yet that is what the Eric Pickles has chosen to do by lobbying not only against his own department's policy - the so-called "conservatory tax" - but attempting to destroy the entire green deal, the government's policy to increase the energy efficiency of 14m of the nation's homes.

How did it come to this? Mixing climate change scepticism with a terror of anything that smells of the "nanny state" produces a combustible brew, more than capable of incinerating common sense. The result is that Pickles and his Conservative MP conspirators want to discourage people living in cosier homes and paying lower energy bills, just as fuel poverty and energy bills are soaring.

There are only two ways to make that add up. One is if you think climate change is not being caused by our relentless burning of fossil fuels, or that you don't think we need to worry about it. If this is your view - despite not a single government or science academy on Earth agreeing with you - then cutting energy use to cut carbon emissions would appear pointless.

But what about saving money? The second way to make this lunacy add up is if you think the principle of the government butting out of your life is so valuable that ministers should just stand by and allow you to burn your own money (and the planet we share).

It's hard to persuade those of the first view above to change their mind. They are a small minority in society and impervious to the evidence, but they are heavily over-represented among old, rightwing men, i.e the Conservative party.

Yet its the second view which really stuns. Even confining ourselves to the narrow world of building regulations, we already submit ourselves to myriad rules to ensure we don't construct death traps. This costs money. The proposals from Pickles's department - to require those building extensions to spend about 10% of the total cost on energy efficiency measures - will save money. You can, if you like, take out a green deal loan for this, the repayments for which will be lower than the energy bill savings from day one.

The cost argument is in fact even broader than this. Improving the energy efficiency of the country's old and leaky homes is by far the cheapest way to cut climate-warming carbon emissions, and cuts energy bills too. But if you hold your right to burn your own money so dear that you refuse to insulate your home, then, with the nation legally bound to reduce its emissions, you're going to be paying for the more-expensive alternatives too. Perhaps you'd like your hard-earned pounds to go on a wind farm, a waste-to-energy incinerator or perhaps a new nuclear power station?

Ultimately, it's about fairness, in my view. If you are one of the 200,000 a year who extend your home, then congratulations and I truly hope you enjoy your new room. But it is justified for me to expect you to make it energy efficient, otherwise I'm going to have to deal with your share of the nation's carbon reductions on top of my own.

The challenge we face in energy and climate change is too great to indulge free riders, so here's a rallying cry even those on the right might - eventually - warm to: zero tolerance for carbon scroungers.

Post by Big Bunny on Apr 17, 2012 9:12:28 GMT -5

EU commission president announces plans to provide access to sustainable energy services for 500 million people by 2030

Mark Tran guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 April 2012 16.20 BST

The European Union (EU) has announced a €50m initiative for clean energy projects in developing countries as part of an ambitious UN plan to provide sustainable energy for all by 2030.

José Manuel Barroso, the EU commission president, said the EU will seek to mobilise additional support of up to several hundred million euros to support concrete new investments for developing countries in the run-up to June's Rio+20 conference on sustainable development.

"Here, today, I would therefore like to set a key objective of the commission's energising development initiative," said Barroso at an EU energy summit in Brussels. "We should seek to provide support to developing countries committing to the initiative, with the aim of providing access to sustainable energy services to 500 million people by 2030."

The energy conference brought together high-level representatives from the EU, UN, developing countries, industry and civil society groups. Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, has designated 2012 as the international year of sustainable energy for all as part of his sustainable energy for all initiative.

About 1.5 billion people worldwide, more than one in five, lack electricity. The UN Development Progamme (UNDP) estimates that, by 2030, the move to clean energy – taking in mitigation and adaptation costs – will cost between $249bn and $1,371bn annually.

While the amounts are large, the UNDP points out they are below current spending on defence, recent banking bailouts, and "perverse" subsidies. Uzbekistan spends almost 13 times more on fossil fuel consumption subsidies than on health – 32% of GDP, compared with 2.5% – while Iran spends 20% of GDP on fossil fuel consumption subsidies, compared with less than 5% on education.

"I welcome the commitment by the European commission in support of the sustainable energy for all initiative," said Ban. "Its strong leadership in making energy central to its development policies, and for advancing the issue of energy access, helps place energy at the forefront of the global development agenda."

The EU is the world's leading donor on energy. Under its recent agenda for change unveiled by development commissioner Andris Piebalgs, energy was confirmed as a key priority. The European commission says it has spent approximately €1bn over the past five years on improving the state of the energy sector in developing countries, including efforts to increase access to modern energy services.

As an example of successful EU energy aid, the commission cited the Pamenu project in Uganda, set up to provide access to basic energy services for rural households, social institutions and small- and medium-sized enterprises.

"With just a small budget, the project has succeeded in extending modern energy services to more than a million people and providing almost 200,000 households with improved cooking stoves," the commission said.

The EU "energising development" initiative announced by Barroso will focus on expanding and improving EU "innovative financial instruments". This could include support to develop public-private partnerships on energy access in developing countries or setting up risk guarantee schemes in developing countries with a bank. The commission said this could potentially result in substantial investments, as it would provide investors with some assurance that their money is secure.

"We will focus on refining, expanding and improving innovative financial instruments to make sure that these billions leverage extraordinary change," said Barroso. "For example, we are working with the European Investment Bank on new risk guarantee schemes in developing countries, which have the potential to leverage enormous investments by providing investors with the certainty that today hinders [by its absence] the realisation of many, otherwise profitable, projects."

NGOs welcomed Barroso's focus on EU development aid at a time when aid budgets are under pressure, but underlined the problem of "policy coherence".

"On the one hand, the EU is launching beneficial support measures for energy access," said Blandine Bouniol, policy co-ordinator at Concord, a European NGO group. "On the other, it's using the developing world as an energy extraction hub for its biofuel demands."

The EU and the US have come under fire for subsidies to promote the use of biofuels, policies blamed for pushing up food prices by diverting corn and other crops from dinner table to fuel tanks.

Others questioned whether EU policy would promote EU technologies and companies only or support local initiatives.

"Will it invest in big projects, working with banks and the private sector, or also support small-scale projects, including civil society?" asked Bernd Nilles, secretary-general of CIDSE, an international alliance of Catholic development agencies. "Reaching local communities, building on their capacities, is essential for real sustainable development."

Post by Big Bunny on Apr 17, 2012 9:14:25 GMT -5

When my second child reaches my age I fear the NHS, along with the tiger and rhino, will be part of a mythologised arcadia

George Monbiot guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 April 2012 20.35 BST

Three weeks old, warm and gently snoring on my shoulder as I write, you are closer to nature than you will ever be again. With your animal needs and animal cries, moved by a slow primordial spirit that will soon be submerged in the cacophony of thought and language, you belong, it seems to me, more to the biosphere than to the human sphere.

Already it feels like years since I saw you, my second daughter, in the scan, your segmented skeleton revealed like an ancient beast uncovered by geologists, buried in the rock of ages. Already I have begun to entertain the hopes and fears to which every parent has succumbed, perhaps since early hominids laid down the prints which show that the human spark had been struck.

Let me begin at the beginning, with the organisation to which you might owe your life. When I was born, almost 50 years ago, in the bitter winter of 1963, the National Health Service was just 15 years old. It must still have been hard for people to believe that – for the first time in the history of these islands – they could fall ill without risking financial ruin, that nobody need die for want of funds. I see this system as the summit of civilisation, one of the wonders of the world.

Now it is so much a part of our lives that it is just as hard to believe that we might lose it. But I fear that, when you have reached my age, free universal healthcare will be a distant fantasy, a mythologised arcadia as far removed from the experience of your children's generation as the Blitz was from mine. One of the lessons you will learn, painfully and reluctantly, is that nothing of public value exists which has not been fought for.

The growth of this system was one of the remarkable features of the first half of the period through which I have lived. Then, wealth was widely shared and the power of those who had monopolised it was shaken. Taxation was used without embarrassment as a means of redistributing the commonwealth of humanity. This great social progress is also being rolled back, and, though perhaps I am getting ahead of myself, I fear for your later years. My generation appears to be squandering your birthright.

This destruction echoes our treatment of the natural world. In my childhood it would never have occurred to me that birds as common as the cuckoo, the sparrow and the starling could suffer so rapid a decline that I would live to see them classed as endangered in this country. I remember the astonishing variety of moths that clustered on the windows on warm summer nights, the eels, dense as wickerwork, moving downriver every autumn, field mushrooms nosing through grassy meadows in their thousands. These are sights that you might never see. By the time your children are born, the tiger, the rhino, the bluefin tuna and many of the other animals that have so enthralled me could be nothing but a cause of regret.

We now have a better understanding than we did when I was born – a year after Silent Spring was published – of the natural limits within which we live. The new science of planetary boundaries has begun to establish the points beyond which the natural resources which make our lives viable can no longer be sustained. Already, this tells us, we may have trespassed across three of the nine boundaries set out by researchers, and we are pushing towards three others.

You may live to see the extremes of climate change I have spent much of my life hoping we can avert, accompanied by further ecological disasters, such as the acidification of the oceans, the loss of most of the world's remaining forests, its wetlands and fossil water reserves, its large predators, fish and coral reefs. If so, you will doubtless boggle at the stupidity and short-sightedness of those who preceded you. No one can claim that we were not warned.

There is another possible route, which I have spent the past two years researching and to which I have decided to devote much of the rest of my working life. This is a positive environmentalism, which envisages the rewilding – the ecological restoration – of large tracts of unproductive land and over-exploited sea. It recognises nature's remarkable capacity to recover, to re-establish the complex web of ecological relationships through which, so far, we have crudely blundered. Rather than fighting only to arrest destruction, it proposes a better, richer world, a place in which, I hope, you would delight to live.

There is one respect at least in which this country and many others have already become better places. I believe that family life, contrary to the assertions of politicians and newspapers, is now better than it has been for centuries, as the old, cold model of detached parenting and the damage – psychological, neurological and (some research suggests) epigenetic – that it appears to have caused finally begins to disappear.

Perhaps the greatest source of hope and social progress arises from our rediscovery of the animal needs of babies and young children: the basic requirements of comfort, contact and attachment. Yes, attached parenting is taxing (now you are beginning to writhe and rumble and I fear that your mother, exhausted from a night of almost constant feeding, will soon have to wake again), but it is, I believe, the one sure foundation of a better world. Knowing what we now know, we have an opportunity to avert the damage, the unrequited needs that have caused so many social ills, which lie perhaps at the root of war, of destructive greed, of the need to dominate.

So this is where hope lies: right at the beginning, with the recognition that you, like all of us, arose from and belong to the natural world.

Post by Big Bunny on Apr 17, 2012 10:20:07 GMT -5

Without belief in climate change, repeating the scientific case for manmade global warming simply bounces off

Adam Corner guardian.co.uk, Friday 30 March 2012 11.29 BST

In a Guardian comment piece last week, Vicky Pope, a senior Met Office scientist, articulated a view that is frequently expressed by scientists: that climate change is a matter of empirical evidence, not belief.

But a decade of social science research on public attitudes shows that in fact, scepticism about climate change is not primarily due to a misunderstanding of "the science".

It is true that most people have only a limited amount of knowledge about climate science (as they do about most specialist subjects). And without doubt, free market and fossil-fuel industry lobbyists have shamelessly acted as "merchants of doubt" , exaggerating the level of uncertainty about climate change, or downplaying its importance.

But in studies that have asked who is sceptical about climate change and why, we find not a story about scientific ignorance, but a link between social attitudes, cultural beliefs and climate change scepticism. The evidence is starkest in the US , but similar patterns are found elsewhere too: older, white, conservative men tend to be more sceptical about climate change.

In a paper just published in the journal Climatic Change, my colleagues and I at Cardiff University asked what would happen when two groups of people - one group sceptical about climate change, the other group not - read the very same information about climate change in the form of newspaper editorials constructed especially for the experiment. We found that these two groups of people evaluated the same information in a very different way, attributing opposing judgments of persuasiveness and reliability to the editorials.

In social psychology, this phenomenon - "biased assimilation" - is well known, and no one is immune from it, so both sceptics and non-sceptics rated the editorials in line with their existing beliefs. The critical difference, of course, is that those who were not climate sceptics had the weight of empirical evidence on their side.

What this experiment illustrates, though, is that "belief" in climate change is very much what matters. Without belief in climate change, scientific evidence simply bounces off. And it is social views and cultural beliefs that predict climate change denial, not people's level of knowledge about climate science.

In fact, recent work by Dan Kahan and his colleagues has found that the more scientifically literate people are, the more their ideological filters kick in when reading information about climate change. It might seem counterintuitive, but the more confidence people have in their ability to grasp the science, the more able they are to slot it into their existing worldview.

So does that mean that climate change communicators should give up? Absolutely not - but we should not be looking to science to provide us with the answer to a problem that is social in nature. The challenge is to find a way of explaining why climate change matters using language and ideas that don't alienate people. Simply repeating the scientific case for climate change is - unfortunately - not going to cut it.

In fact, the more we know, the less it seems that climate change scepticism has to do with climate science at all. Climate change provokes such visceral arguments because it allows ancient battles - about personal responsibility, state intervention, the regulation of industry, the distribution of resources and wealth, or the role of technologies in society - to be fought all over again.

It follows that the answer to overcoming climate change scepticism is to stop reiterating the science, and start engaging with what climate change scepticism is really about - competing visions of how people see the world, and what they want the future to be like.

Do you "believe" in climate change might not be the scientifically rational question to ask, but it is the most essential one to address if we are to understand - and ultimately get beyond - climate change scepticism.

Post by Big Bunny on Apr 17, 2012 10:29:39 GMT -5

'Polluter pays' is the only principle that can limit aviation emissions

We cannot accept threats of all kinds of trouble just because a small price has to be paid for the pollution caused by travel

Connie Hedegaard guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 4 April 2012 06.00 BST

COP15 Airplane and carbon : plane flies through low cloud in Sydney, AustraliaDespite pressure from the EU, states in the International Civil Aviation Organisation have not yet agreed on a global solution to limit aviation emissions. Photograph: Tim Wimborne/Reuters

Why all the fuss about aviation? Why has Europe passed its own laws to make airlines reduce their CO2 emissions? And why don't we have international rules for an international sector?

It's right to ask these questions. The answers are important, too. Since 1997 we have been working to achieve an international agreement in this sector. No one can doubt that this will be the best way forward for this truly international sector.

Despite work and pressure from the EU, states in the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) have not yet agreed on a global solution to limit aviation emissions. No one has fought harder than the EU to find a global solution – and we are still trying to reach agreement.

But one thing the world did manage to agree on back in 2001 was that emissions trading could be a good thing for international aviation. After another three years of fruitless discussions on an international approach, ICAO concluded in 2004 that the most promising approach would instead be for countries and regions to incorporate aviation into their general CO2 trading systems (where they existed) with the ICAO providing guidance.

It was as a result of this that the commission tabled a proposal in 2006 to include aviation in the EU's emissions trading system. This was before my time as a commissioner, but I do recall that all the member states were solidly in favour of the proposal. The European parliament was also overwhelmingly in favour.

So the law was adopted in 2008 and is in full application from 1 January this year. The background is important now that we are hearing the reactions.

Outside Europe many countries question our law – even though in December last year the European court of justice rejected all complaints. And many who formerly had not contributed much to achieving a global agreement – to put it mildly – have now become warm advocates of such an agreement.

No one is keener than Europe to see an ambitious and internationally coordinated approach on aviation. This is why we are now devoting our energy to forging a global deal to curb air emissions.

But we will only be able to achieve an agreement if some of the countries that have until now resisted it change their position. It is not enough just to say we need an agreement.

If we were to ask people who fly whether the polluter-pays principle should also apply to aviation I believe most of them would be unequivocally in favour.

And let's get the proportions right. In this debate the aviation industry at times seems to imply we are talking about enormous sums of money per ticket. Our calculations indicate that a flight from, say, New York to London would cost less than £2 per passenger. In other words, less than the cost of a cup of coffee at the airport.

Proportions are important, particularly when China is threatening to cancel orders with Europe if we do not suspend our law. We in Europe cannot, of course, give in to such threats; in addition, the cost for Chinese airlines is estimated at some €1.9m a year. It is a small sum to threaten with a trade war.

We cannot accept threats of all kinds of trouble just because a small price has to be paid for the pollution caused by travel while no one grumbles about paying for online tickets, extra luggage or seat reservations.

Other European industries are already reducing their emissions. The more sectors avoid contributing, the harder it is for those who do. I think that most aircraft passengers would agree that it is reasonable to ask the aviation sector to contribute too.

• Connie Hedegaard is the European Union's climate action commissioner

Post by Big Bunny on Apr 20, 2012 23:51:57 GMT -5

The EU's climate goal is the world's most ambitious, but how much of it is based on false accounting?

Arthur Neslen guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 18 April 2012 07.59 BST

The EU is counting on biomass, but could run out of harvestable wood before 2020 ... Steven's Croft biomass power station. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

The EU has earned a lot of credit on the international climate scene. It has pushed through a roadmap to a second Kyoto deal at the Durban climate change summit, and stood firm on tugging global airlines into a carbon-pricing scheme.

More than anything it has demonstrated its good faith with a pioneering set of decarbonisation targets at home: the "20-20-20" goals. By 2020, the EU has pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20% of their 1990 level, and to increase the share of renewables to 20% of the energy mix. It also has a voluntary target to increase energy efficiency by 20% on 2005 levels, and an obligation to source 10% of its transport fuels from renewable energy sources by the same year.

"We're not waiting for talks to end in binding targets," the climate commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, said in Brussels, shortly before the Durban summit. "We're trying to move forward with our low-carbon roadmap, energy efficiency, discussing how we can increase efforts back home."

She had reason to sound confident. The EU's climate and environment directorates are staffed with some of the most talented and dedicated friends of the earth that you could find. But what if a culture of creative accounting, for reasons of political expediency, was robbing the targets they were working for of any credibility?

Of the EU's three 20% goals for 2020:

• Emissions reductions themselves are counted at the point of production and not of use, thus allowing an estimated 7% of Europe's carbon emissions to be outsourced to the developing world, through international trade. This oversight is rooted in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)'s carbon-accounting rules, rather than Brussels'. But EU member states stick to these rules like glue, and they raise a question mark over any reported carbon dioxide reductions.

• Half of the EU's accounted increase in renewable energy uptake is expected to come from biomass, much of which some scientists fear may not reduce real emissions at all, even if Brussels counts it as doing so. Biomass can – and in the majority of cases may – come from unsustainable forest use in Europe and abroad, thereby increasing rather than reducing emissions. On current trends, the EU could run out of harvestable wood before 2020 and is said to be counting on energy savings to reduce Europe's overall power-consumption levels.

• But energy-efficiency objectives, as a non-binding measure, will almost certainly not be met. The EU is currently on track for around 9% energy savings – less than half the declared target. And even as civil servants gut the few paltry measures proposed in the energy efficiency directive to help it along, EU states are pushing for "early actions" to be "double counted".

With the commission's other 10% target for renewable energy in transport – which will mostly be met by conventional biofuels – the EU's own research suggests that it is unlikely to reduce emissions at all, despite the programme's exorbitant cost. Scientists again blame a "double counting" of emissions. Many commission officials are uneasy about the implications.

The EU is a trendsetter in global climate policy, and has the world's most ambitious climate goal: an 80-95% cut in CO2 emissions by 2050, measured against 1990 levels. Later this year, Brussels will announce new interim climate targets for 2030 and possibly 2040 as milestones along the way. The rest of the world will no doubt watch agog – or aghast, waiting for the plans to unravel.

But this is why any fears of a parallel with the run-in to the Eurozone meltdown need to be addressed now. Then, the EU's book-keepers approved billions of euros of bad loans to countries such as Greece, which had dressed up their public finances to make it appear as though they were meeting criteria when they were not. Greek number-crunchers reportedly used a known loophole in the EU's accounting system to "juke the stats".

If a similar culture of false accounting in the commission and the EU member states is in play now, it could eventually help produce a policy failure of equally catastrophic proportions, even if it is not immediately felt.

• Arthur Neslen is environment correspondent for European news service EurActiv

Post by Big Bunny on Apr 20, 2012 23:54:50 GMT -5

The fall in the UK's greenhouse-gas emissions is more than offset by the rising consumption of electronics made in China

Fiona Harvey guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 18 April 2012 07.00 BST

UK consumers are buying ever more goods produced in industrial zones such as this one in Huaxi, China. Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters

Britons' consumption of goods such as TVs and mobile phones made in China has "outsourced" the UK's greenhouse-gas emissions, and is leading to a net increase in global emissions, according to a report from an influential committee of MPs.

While the UK's own greenhouse-gas emissions have been tumbling, people and businesses have been buying an increasing proportion of manufactured products from overseas, where regulations on carbon emissions are often much weaker than within the EU. As a result, the increase in carbon emissions from goods produced overseas that are then used in Britain are now outstripping the gains made in cutting emissions here.

Tim Yeo, chairman of the energy and climate change committee, said: "Successive governments have claimed to be cutting climate-changing emissions, but in fact a lot of pollution has simply been outsourced overseas. We get through more consumer goods than ever before in the UK, and this is pushing up emissions in manufacturing countries like China."

However, while China has become the world's biggest producer of greenhouse-gas emissions, it has also become the world's second biggest economy on the back of the enormous exports from its vast manufacturing sector. This means that, in effect, consumers from developed countries have paid China to take on responsibility for more greenhouse-gas emissions.

The Chinese government is reluctant to deal with the problem, insisting that China is taking on voluntary emissions-reduction targets, but is resistant to moves that would force Chinese manufacturers to obey stricter emissions limits.

This can put developed-world manufacturers at a disadvantage, which encourages the production of goods in areas with lax carbon controls, and thus pushes up emissions globally. Simon Harrison, chair of energy policy at the Institution of Engineering and Technology, said: "It's about how you price imported goods – do you take account of the emissions involved in their production?"

When goods are manufactured in the UK and other European countries, the companies that make them are subject to strict emissions controls. For instance, they have to pay for the carbon they produce, and pay a surcharge on energy to subsidise renewable forms of generation. But overseas exporters in countries such as China and India are not subject to such stringent regulation, and often their manufacturing processes and energy generation are more carbon-intensive than the same processes here.

The government is in a quandary over what to do about the situation. Though importing carbon-intensive goods from overseas helps the UK to cut its overall emissions, it does not help to cut emissions globally, but just shifts the problem elsewhere. However, to slap import tariffs on goods from overseas that are produced in a carbon-intensive manner – which some UK manufacturers have said they would welcome – would be difficult under the World Trade Organisation's rules.

Some green campaigners are urging the government to take responsibility for the emissions produced in the manufacture of imported goods. Andrew Pendleton, head of campaigns at Friends of the Earth, said: "One of the main reasons why nations such as China have soaring carbon emissions is because they are making goods to sell to rich western countries. This report highlights the UK's role in creating this pollution. The government can't continue to turn a blind eye to the damaging impact that our hunger for overseas products has on our climate. We need to tackle the problem, not shift it abroad."

As the committee of MPs pointed out, while the UK's own greenhouse-gas emissions have been tumbling – the result of switching from coal to gas for energy generation, as well as greater efficiency and an increasing share of renewable energy – the amount of goods the UK consumes from overseas has increased.

The report said: "The UK's territorial emissions have been going down, while the UK's consumption-based emissions, overall, have been going up. The rate at which the UK's consumption-based emissions have increased have far offset any emissions savings from the decrease in territorial emissions. This means that the UK is contributing to a net increase in global emissions."

The "offshoring" of manufacturing to cheaper countries such as China has been one of the most important factors, they found.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change said: "Greenhouse gas emissions in the UK have been cut by 23% since 1990. We account for our emissions according to international rules that are followed by all countries that are signed up to the Kyoto Protocol, and that are the basis for international negotiations on climate change. While embedded emissions [that result from the manufacture of goods overseas] can provide useful insights into how to decarbonise, such figures are difficult to calculate accurately, uncertain and not easily verified. It would therefore be difficult to negotiate a global emission reduction treaty on this basis, and an attempt could delay for decades an effective solution to the problem of climate change."

The MPs, ministers and UK business groups agree that the best way to deal with the problem is to have a global, legally binding agreement on cutting emissions and dealing with climate change. The current state of international negotiations, however, means that no such agreement can come into force before 2020 – the date by which leading scientists say global emissions should have peaked and begun to be reduced rapidly, if the world is to avoid dangerous levels of warming.